The Relationships Between Sleep Patterns and Reactive and Endogenous Depressions

Abstract

In the British Journal of Psychiatry for July, 1963, Costello and Smith described an investigation based on the prediction that “… reactive depressions would sleep more at the end than at the beginning of a set period of sleep and that endogenous depressions would sleep more at the beginning than at the end of a set period for sleep …”. Hourly observation by nurses of the sleep of 18 patients with endogenous and 41 with reactive depression failed to confirm the prediction.